Today’s leading enterprises are using distributed, interconnected digital infrastructure to supercharge their business strategies. They’re speeding up processes, getting closer to end users, and collaborating with business partners to innovate and unlock new opportunities. The role of service providers is to enable this digital success by helping their enterprise customers deploy the latest capabilities when and where they need them.
To provide the global on-demand access their enterprise customers expect, service providers need a standardized, agile interconnection platform, capable of deploying flexible, high-bandwidth virtual connections at software speed. This is where Equinix Fabric® can help. When service providers make their offerings available on Equinix Fabric, they can reach more customers, faster and in more strategic locations worldwide. They can also strengthen their own digital infrastructure through access to their fellow service providers and all the capabilities found on Platform Equinix®.
Access an ecosystem with thousands of potential customers
The primary benefit that service providers get from adopting Equinix Fabric is access to the Equinix digital ecosystem, the largest and most widely distributed digital ecosystem on the planet. There are more than 10,000 Equinix customers worldwide, of which more than 5,000 are enterprises. Among these enterprises are many of the biggest names across various sectors, including more than half of Fortune 500 companies.
The Equinix Fabric interconnection platform can help service providers access our customer ecosystem from many different locations across the globe. Equinix IBX® data centers in more than 50 metros across five continents currently offer Equinix Fabric availability, with new metros being added all the time.
Ensuring proximity to thousands of your fellow service providers, including cloud hyperscalers, can help you make your solutions more scalable, flexible and reliable. Equinix Fabric offers 200+ cloud on-ramps in locations around the globe—significantly more than any other digital infrastructure platform. As your customers plan to implement hybrid multicloud architectures, you’ll be able to support them with on-demand connections to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud and more.
We also offer a variety of tools for customers to find the right service providers in the right places, and for service providers to find each other. The Equinix Fabric provider directory makes it simple to search for on-demand cloud, networking, IaaS and SaaS solutions. In addition, the Equinix Marketplace helps enterprise buyers and service providers find and connect with one another in strategic locations throughout the world.
Once customers have found the solutions they need on Equinix Fabric, our self-service web portal allows them to set virtual connections to service providers in a matter of minutes. In short, when your services are available on Equinix Fabric, it’s simple and straightforward for customers to begin using them. It’s no wonder our customers have created more than 50,000 virtual connections on Equinix Fabric worldwide, with thousands more added every year.
Provide scalable access to customers worldwide
Service providers need only connect from a single port in any Equinix Fabric metro, and they’ll instantly be able to offer remote access to their services worldwide. All Equinix customers will be able to start using those services directly from any other Equinix Fabric metro. Since service providers can deploy locally and then start connecting with customers globally, they can offer highly scalable services with fewer infrastructure deployments required.
Thanks to our recent launch of virtual connections as large as 50 Gbps, Equinix Fabric ports can better support high-bandwidth use cases such as AI and machine learning. Virtual connections are also more dynamic and faster to provision than physical cross connects. This means that it’s easy for your enterprise customers to start using more of your services to keep up with the growth of their business.
Benchmark testing shows that direct, private interconnection on Equinix Fabric offers significantly higher performance than the public internet for cloud workloads, across a variety of different scenarios. In addition, availability of advanced encryption technologies such as MACsec over EPL can help you provide security capabilities on a global scale, so that your customers can feel confident using cloud services for even their most sensitive data sets.
Equinix Fabric also offers integration with other Equinix services and third-party offerings, thus providing even more connectivity options and greater flexibility. For instance, thanks to integration with Equinix Internet Access, customers can deploy redundant, low-latency blended internet access directly from the Equinix Fabric portal. In addition, integration with network service providers means that access to services via Equinix Fabric can extend outside of Equinix IBX data centers.
Build on a global digital infrastructure platform
Equinix Fabric is built on Platform Equinix, the global digital infrastructure platform that brings together the places, partners and possibilities that companies need to be successful in the digital economy. Any device or service that connects to Equinix Fabric can connect to any other device or service on Equinix Fabric, whether physical or virtual, anywhere in the world. This means that service providers that deploy on Equinix Fabric have much greater flexibility around what digital infrastructure they deploy, and where they deploy it.
Platform Equinix offers a digital platform that allows service providers to break free from the limitations of their traditional physical infrastructure. This puts them in a better position to meet the high expectations of today’s demanding customers, including access to more global markets and more value-added capabilities. The video below shows what this might look like for a network service provider trying to accelerate its telco cloud deployments and offer reliable, low-latency services on demand for its enterprise customers.
At Equinix, we understand that complexity around multicloud networking is a major challenge for both service providers and enterprises. Equinix Fabric can help simplify it by allowing customers to manage connections across multiple cloud providers in a consistent, standardized manner. Going forward, we plan to make things even better for our customers with the launch of a new virtual routing capability on Equinix Fabric.
This new solution will support cloud-to-cloud routing and other multicloud use cases without the need for customers to deploy specialized equipment. In short, it will provide even more flexibility for service providers to build the architecture that best meets the needs of their business and customers.
Additional information on this new solution will be available soon. For now, read the guide to learn more about how Equinix Fabric can help service providers scale their solutions globally, get closer to customers and create new revenue streams.
You may also be interested to read the white paper Create digital advantage at software speed. You’ll learn how service providers are helping their enterprise customers meet the high expectations of end users via strategic, easily accessible partnerships.
